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Saturday, December 29, 2012

Why does it have to get cold?

[Note: I am just complaining with the title, I don’t need an explanation.]

I don’t think I have sufficiently mentioned that almost immediately as we started heading north, it got colder. La Paz had a constant north wind that made it chilly. In fact, after that, it felt like every mile farther north felt like it was a degree cooler.

In fact, when we arrived at Laguna de Ojo Liebre, it looked like there was snow every where, and it almost wouldn’t have been surprising based upon the temperature. Fortunately, it was just salt and foam.

Anyways, enough complaining. After the lagoon visit, we crossed the border over into Baja California (norte). I guess since it was Christmas Day, no one really wanted to work, so when we crossed the checkpoint, we were expecting to at least someone to be standing there, but the “inspectors” were on the side of the road watching someone wash their car, so we just drove slowly on through without be checked. That didn’t carry over to the military checkpoint later that day, though. They took their time and inspected everything.

Unfortunately, when we left Guerrero Negro area, we forgot we were entering the gas gap of Baja. So we did not have a full tank to try and take us to the next town with gas, El Rosario, and I had planned to explore in the Cataviña region before then. As we neared our stop for the night, we were already in the red and we still had another 125 km to go. Jonathan emptied our spare gas into the tank and I limited our exploration to one stop along the road.

According to our guide booklet, there was Rupestrian (rock or cave art) paintings along the side of the road not far from our campground. So the next day I had Jonathan stop there. Sure enough, we finally got to see some of the Native American art on rocks! These are not considered as impressive as those near Mulegé, but they did satisfy one of my requirements when coming to Baja.

We left there and drove cautiously, hoping to make it all the way to the next gas station. And, hallelujah, we did! I didn’t really want to test out the Green Angel service while we were down here if I could avoid it.

The rest of the journey north was mostly uneventful. We did stop and eat at a McDonald’s, but I was extremely disappointed. Not only was the menu very limited, it didn’t have anything uniquely Mexican except for offering a “cheese” pie in addition to the apple pie. Oh, I guess I should give them credit for the “Auto-Mac” for the drive-thru. From here though, the van started having little issues. I thought that they might be related to the cold weather, but it kept running.